STAYING ON TRACK

The Newsletter of the Lubbock Model Railroad Association

APRIL 2003

CONVENTION TIME DRAWS NEAR

Time draws closer to the June 13 Lone Star Convention, right here in Lubbock. To participate in the convention you must not only be a member of the LSR, but you must register for the convention. Please fill out a convention registration form and mail it to me at the club's address (P.O. Box 53674, Lubbock, TX 79453). They are available at our web site. I will bring some copies with me to the meeting this Monday. You need to register to be able to go the meeting or to help run it.

SPECIAL OFFER

I recently received a special offer from Carsten's Publications. It regards a train ride through Canada called the American Orient Express (note this is an oxymoron). Their introduction reads as follows:

The 1940s and '50s represented an era of romance and glamour. It was a time when passengers boarded the great streamliner trains bound for points across North America. Today, after $15 million in renovations, these beautiful cars once again ride the rails, glistening with polished mahogany and brass and designed to reflect the style of the golden age of travel - when traveling was meant to be relaxed and savored - not rushed. The sixteen vintage carriages, painted in their signature blue and gold, carry approximately 100 passengers, who are attended to by a highly trained, professional staff and crew. Their sole purpose is not just to meet, but to surpass your expectations of the quality and service befitting the honored tradition of the great luxury Streamliners.

There is much more. There are dining cars, lounge cars, dome cars, sleeping cars and lectures "on board". The trip takes 10 days and nine nights and goes from Vancouver, British Columbia to Montreal, Quebec. Tour prices run from $3,790 to $6,790 per person if you register before April 18.

I will bring the brochure with me if you are interested. If too many people want to sign up, I will make some copies.

DUES WAS DUE

It is now past time to pay dues for 2003. The grace period ends at the end of March. Those who have not paid are dropped from the newsletter mailing list. Hopefully, this will be determined to be a bad thing.

APRIL CLINIC

We are trying something new this April for the clinic. We are going to do some basic repair work on the club pike layout sections. The intent is not to radically change anything, but to "spruce up" the ballast and scenery to get them looking as good as possible for the LSR convention. Randel will bring the four corner units to the April meeting. Our clinic that night will be to work on them. Garron has volunteered to bring a color-suitable ballast so that all the track work in all the units will look the same. Club members need to bring scenery items such as groundcover, trees, bushes, detail items, track spikes, track gauges, etc.

We will start with the corner units and then use the May and June clinics to finish the rest of the segments. With a little contribution from all the club members, we can get the club pike looking first rate without changing the original work or intent of the builder.

THANK YOU

Randel wants to be sure to say a "Thank You" to all the people who helped set up, run and take down the modules at Godeke Library in March. These setups are good for the club. They allow people to see good modeling and get introduced to the LMRA. They even get to take home a business card if they wish.

GUEST SPEAKER

Ron Kutch sent me this resume of Richard Troxell, our guest speaker for the LSR convention.

October 1986 to present: Goodnews Products, Inc., president, sub-chapter S Corporation. I write and do some publishing. I spend a lot of time speaking about trains and barbecue to civic and social organizations. I have authored: Barbecuing Around Texas and Texas Trains, Republic of Texas imprint, Wordware Publishing. Wordware recently sold its Republic of Texas imprint to Rowman & Littlefield Publishing of Maryland (I hope they do their publishing better than Marylanders do their barbecue).

I retired to Fredericksburg, Texas in 1995. Prior to that I owned an advertising agency in Houston, Texas.

Bee, my wife, says, "Richard never met a stranger."

I am in good health. Very active. Play tennis three times a week. President of Fredericksburg Tennis Association. Past Lt. Governor of Kiwanis Texas-Oklahoma District, Division 3. Organized four Kiwanis clubs; brought in 47 members in one year.

Graduated from SMU with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1950.

Richard

UPCOMING EVENTS

Train operations at the Arts Festival will be April 11, 12, and 13, 2003 at the civic center (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday).

The Carillon retirement home train operations are Tuesday, June 23 and Wednesday, June 25, 2003.

If anyone has any question call Randel at home (788-0701) or at work (771-5600). Or you can e-mail him at [email protected] .

GRAYING AND PLAYING WITH TRAINS

By Terry Pristin as printed in The New York Times , Wednesday, January 15, 2003, pg. B1.

Go past the railroad crossing sign, descend a flight of stairs and there, in a grimy basement store crammed with as many as 100,000 items, Allan J. Spitz can usually be found behind the counter. Often his cat, Kirby, is draped over his shoulders as he briskly dispenses advice to a stream of customers, most of them middle-aged and male.

Mr. Spitz, 56, who conducts business in midwinter wearing torn Bermuda shorts and rubber sandals, is the owner of the Red Caboose, one of two shops specializing in model trains that face each other across 45 th Street between Fifth Avenue and the avenue of the Americas.

The Red Caboose and its neighbor, Manhattan Train and Hobby, are remnants of what was once a thriving little district catering to model train enthusiasts. At one time, there were five such stores on 45 th and 46 th Streets, including one run by a colorful entrepreneur known as Ma Webster that was in the space now occupied by the Red Caboose. In 1952, that store had 14 employees: Mr. Spitz makes do with two at most.

The two existing stores are struggling to survive, a reflection of the hobby's waning popularity - nationally, and not just in New York, where apartments seldom can accommodate the spaced devouring displays known as layouts. "I don't think there's enough business for two stores", Mr. Spitz said. "I don't know if there's enough business for one store."

In the pre-jet 1950's, it seemed as if every boy coveted a train set made by Lionel, once the world's leading toy manufacturer. But these days, model trains are an increasingly geriatric pursuit. Fifteen years ago, the average customer was 43. Today, he - and the customer is almost a "he" - is at least 50. The average age of members of the National Model Railroad Association, a promotional organization in Chattanooga, Tenn., is 55 said Gordon Best, the library director.

Today's customer is more likely to be someone like James R. Songer, a Manhattan architect, who returned to model trains after a lapse of many decades, a familiar pattern among older railroaders. At 63, he is trying to recreate the El Dorado, Kan., of his boyhood, when the Santa Fe and Missouri Pacific railroads came through town belching black smoke. Working in N-scale (one-160th the size of an actual train), Mr. Songer expects to spend $12,000 on his meticulous research project, which will include a doodlebug, the one-car train that shuttled between nearby town, and the luxury Chief, Super Chief and El Capitan trains.

Mr. Songer said he could still remember what the trains sounded like as they roared through town. "There's nothing that brings such intense pleasure than doing something that takes the skill and patience of a hobby and is connected to those childhood memories, he said.

Michael Dickey, 39, an investment banker who is originally from Pennsylvania, started with an N-scale layout of the Starrucca Viaduct in Susquehanna County, PA, and accumulated a dozen engines and 60 cars. He painted them to look weathered and painstakingly built scenery.

Now that he has a 3-year-old son, Mr. Dickey has taken up the more kid-friendly G-scale (the real thing is 22.5 times larger) and is storing his N-scale layout in his basement. "You've got to be constantly building," he said.

It's easy to imagine that there are many reasons that this kind of exacting work has less appeal to young people than it used to. Model trains are an expensive hobby requiring a combination of skills, from electrical wiring to carpentry to painting that children absorbed with computers may not have developed. Trains themselves no longer have a hold on the imagination of those accustomed to swiftly spanning huge distances by airplane.

Mr. Dickey, whose new train set occupies a third of his living room in Larchmont, N.Y. has another explanation: "It's a nerdy hobby," he said.

. . . To be continued next month .

Staying on Track is published monthly by the LMRA - David W. Lamberts, editor.

Visit us on the Internet at www.railserve.com/lmra

E-mail me at [email protected]

Our mailing address is PO Box 53674, Lubbock, TX 79453

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STAYING ON TRACK

The Newsletter of the Lubbock Model Railroad Association MAY 2003

SCALE VS GAUGE

This is probably preaching to the choir, but scale and gauge are different. There is an excellent web site maintained by Ross Crain at www.spec2000.net/modeltrains.htm where you can find more than you ever thought possible about the statistics regarding the various scale/gauge combinations. Click on �RR Scale /Gauge Encyclopedia.� He must have done it on an Excel spreadsheet. Very impressive.

NEW AUCTION SITE

I recently receive an e-mail from Wiseman Model Services. It seems he has set up an auction site called TrainBid which has nothing to do with E-Bay. His launch date is set for May 1, 2003. His mail states that this will be the railroader�s ultimate tool for buying and selling with confidence and ease. He states his listing pages will be easy to read and easy to use. His auction categories include large scale (live steam), G, HO, N, O, S, videos, full size prototypes, Lionel, toy trains, railroadiana, books and magazines. He advertises low fees. His take is 4% on items up to $24.99, 2.25% on items form $25 to $999.99 and 1.5% on items above $1000. His web site is www.trainbid.com . Check it out.

I have no financial interest in his site or his business.

NEW MEETING TIME

Randel wants everyone to know that the meeting time for the May meeting is 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30 p.m. That may give us more time to work on the modules. As in April, we will be working on the ground cover of the modules, so please bring some scenery material. We got a lot done last meeting, but the scenery has suffered the ravages of time and a lot of it is actually missing.

CONVENTION HOTEL - LOST AND FOUND

Some of you may already have heard that we �lost� lost our convention hotel at the Sheraton Four Points. The hotel was sold recently and they are going to be closing portions of the hotel for remolding this summer. They could not hold our convention in June. However, the Holiday Inn, Park Plaza on the south loop has stepped up and is going to take over for the Sheraton. Thanks to the efforts of Ron Kutch, they are going to match essentially all of the contract stipulations in our contract with the Sheraton. Actually, their convention facility is probably a little better and bigger than the Sheraton. Meets are scheduled in May to work out details. It seems this cloud had a silver lining.

CONVENTION UPDATE

The LMRA will need bodies to work at the convention. You must be a LSR member to participate. What a great time to join the NMRA and the LSR at the same time. I can supply you with forms, but the easiest way to join is to go the NMRA web site and join on-line. You can also join the LSR at the same time.

MORE WEB PAGES

While on the subject of web pages, there was an excellent listing the in April issue of Model Railroader called �Lionel�s 10 favorite Web Sites� (by Lionel Strange). I have visited some of them and they are excellent. If you missed the article, here they are:

1) Rensselaer Model Railroad Society

2) Railroad Data Page

3) Joe Fugate�s Siskiyou Line

4) Caboose Hobbies

5) 1/87 Vehicle & Equipment Club

6) Fallen Flags and Short Line Railroad Photos

7) Jack Burgess� Yosemite Valley RR

8) RailServe The Internet Railroad Directory

9) Kadee

10) National Model Railroad Association

HOMASOTE REVISITED

Some years ago I wrote an article about Homasote, that mysterious hard-to-find material that everybody keeps talking about for roadbed. In the April issue of the NMRA bulletin appears the following:

If you�ve ever built a model railroad, chances are the brand name Homasote is familiar to you. It� the stuff many of us use for sub-roadbed and sometimes even the roadbed itself. But what is it exactly and how do they make it? Attendees of the Mid eastern Region�s fall convention got to find out. According to an article by Mike McNamara in the region�s publication, the Local, the folks at the Homasote Company opened their doors to conventioneers fo a tour. The company is located in Trenton, New Jersey and was founded in 1909. Today it is a $30 million public company that produces sound-deadening materials, concrete expansion joints, fabric-covered office partitions and of course the 4' x 8' sheets of Homasote board we model railroaders know and love.

Now to the answers to the questions we started with. Homasote is made primarily from recycled newspaper. In fact, trash trucks bring curbside pickups directly to the plant form a three-county area in New Jersey. But how do they make it? First workers separate cardboard and other trash form the newspapers. The newsprint is then loaded into huge vats that resemble very, very large kitchen blenders (imagine one that�s twenty feet deep with six-foot blades.) Water is added, and then the �blenders� are turned on. The resulting mixture is filtered for impurities, then a copper-based chemical and paraffin are added. Next, the solution is dumped into molds, and most of the water is pressed out. Then comes more processing in which still more water is removed, followed by �baking� in huge drying ovens. After drying, the boards are cut down to the 4' x 8' size we�re familiar with. Finally the product is shipped out to appreciative model railroaders and other users (by way of building supply dealers everywhere.)

If you�d like to know more, check out their Web site at http://www.homasote.com,. The Web site also has a handy feature that allows you to find a Homasote dealer near you.

MODEL RAILROAD EXPO

The New Mexico Rail RunNers are holding their meeting this year at the Roswell Convention Center at 912 North Main Street. The dates and times are 31 May 2003 from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and 1 June 2003 from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Admission is $2.00 per adult and $1.00 per youth (13 - 18). Kids under 13 are admitted free. They will feature layouts from the Eddy County Model Railroad Club, Alamagordo �Scale Train Society, Clovis Depot Railway Historical & Modeling Society and the New Mexico Rail RunNers.

HUMOR?

You know you are a Railfan when . . .

You barbeque using tie butts, for that special flavor.

You refuse to cross the tracks until your favorite train has passed by.

When riding with someone who�s backing into a parking space, you say, �two cars, one car, that�ll do.�

GRAYING AND PLAYING WITH TRAINS

Continued from the April issue.

By Terry Prisitn as printed in The New York Times , Wednesday, January 15, 2003, pg. B1.

Ralph Israel, 50, the owner of Manhattan Train and Hobby, finds it sad that the hobby has lost its cachet just as the cabooses and locomotives, even the tiniest ones, look more realistic than ever. �There are a lot more stores like this one closing than opening,� he said, �but at the same time, the product line has advanced remarkably and is getting better all the time.�

Today, most of the engines and cars are made in China, with so much attention to detail that what looks like a tiny speck of paint on, say, a Z-scale gondola, a flat open freight car, will turn out to be actual lettering when held under a magnifying glass. Even Lionel, the Nation�s oldest manufacturer of toy trains, which was one based in New York, recently moved its manufacturing operations to China.

Model trains come in various price ranges, from a $100 starter set to the $1,500 gold-and-platinum New York Central steam engine and fuel-transporting tender that Lionel issued in 2000 to commemorate its centenary.

Antique trains can cost much more.

These days, serious hobbyists are spending more than they used to on more precisely detailed replicas, an average of about $1,300 a year, said Fred Hamilton, the executive director of the Model railroad Industry Association, an organization based in Seattle that represents 150 manufactures. �The general consensus is that the hobby itself is pretty stagnant,� he said, �but the number of dollars spent has increased.�

About 500,000 people in North America are involved with model trains, spending more than $500 million a year, according to Model Railroader magazines, the hobby�s bible.

In New York in the 1950s and 60s, a child could equip a toy railroad at stores like Sears, at the local hardware store, or at various hobby shops. Ma Webster�s shop was described as the worlds largest store devoted exclusively to model railroads. Today, however the city has only a handful of hobby shops. Nationwide, the number of hobby shops selling model trains has decreased by 25 percent over the last decade, said Terry D. Thompson, Model Railroader�s editor. About 10 percent of sales are made over the internet, he said.

Until recently, Mr. Spitz had the only model train store on 45 th Street and Mr. Israel was his employee. But in 1998, after Mr. Spitz refused to give him a share of his business, Mr. Israel quite and eventually opened his own store. �Instead of a friend and partner,� Mr. Israel said of Mr. Spitz, �he now is an enemy and competitor.�

To be continued . . .

WHAT IS THE TRAILING LOAD?

The weight of cars that a locomotive pulls is usually referred to as the trailing load, expressed in tons of actual weight of cars and contents.

LUBBOCK MODEL RAILROAD ASSOCIATION
PO BOX 53674
LUBBOCK, TX 79453

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